


Skin

by redskyatmorning



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst, Coda, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-15 17:43:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11236008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redskyatmorning/pseuds/redskyatmorning
Summary: Back in his own body on the night of Azazel's curse, Magnus contemplates himself and shares a moment with Alec.





	Skin

 

When he was younger, Magnus used to think of his body as a mortal would. Mortals aren’t often concerned with the corporeal flesh, he has noticed, at least not in all of its capacities. The body is function, and the body is pleasure, and the body, for them, is temporary. A transient vessel for their so-called immortal souls. Their bodies do not weather centuries with them.

 So much has passed, and so many have died, since Magnus was young. There is nothing left of that youth, that distant year, except what he carries with him day after day after day – memory, and bone. He opens and closes his hands experimentally, watching the way the tendons expand and contract, skin stretched over the veins burgeoning with blood and magic. Sometimes he wishes there was a way, like rings on tree stumps, to measure the centuries this skin has seen. After everything else has passed to ashes and dust, this body has remained. Mortals could never understand how that feels, the ache, the familiarity, the fondness. A room, dusty and old though it may be, that houses everything you’ve ever known or owned. The body is home, that scarred flesh and bone and blood and sinew building the only home that does not burn away with time. The only thing that is just as permanent as an immortal soul.

Mortals, Magnus has also noticed, often get so caught up in the philosophical and metaphysical contemplations of living forever that they don’t always realize what it actually is to live within one body for hundreds of years. Nobody realizes how many scars will come with that. Certainly, most of them have healed with time or magic, the faintest white marks remaining of wounds that were once gouging and deep. But they are there, and Magnus remembers every one of them, and they give him a certain kind of comfort, a tally-mark reminder that that was a moment that happened, that that was a time that he lived through. A most intimate sort of memorabilia. Like rings on trees, he supposes, smiling faintly at the thought. He looks at himself in the mirror. He has taken off the shirt he was wearing, feeling dirty in it. He can count every scar; and even where they have completely healed, leaving smooth skin, there remains a ghost. He tilts his head in contemplation of himself.

After everything that time has wrenched away from him, after all the loss, this was the one thing she could not take—or so he had thought. Even now that he is back in his own body, it doesn’t feel like it was the way he left it. A kind of violation that is difficult to explain: you come home, the windows are shattered, nothing stolen, but the hairs are raised on the back of your neck when you try to sleep, staring at the faint print of someone else’s footsteps on your floor, and you don’t feel safe, and you don’t feel as if anything that belongs to you is entirely yours anymore.

Cat eyes suddenly stare back at him from the mirror, yellow and slit-pupiled. It doesn’t make him feel much better, but he does not put the glamour back on.

He turns away from his reflection, shrugging on a silk shirt, royal blue. He tilts his head towards the closed bedroom door, listening for sounds of life. Sure enough – pacing, sighing. Alec hasn’t left, though it’s been a few hours since they last spoke. Magnus never told him to leave. He doesn’t know if he wants him to. What he wants right now is something to eat, even though he isn’t hungry. Something normal, something to ground him.

Steeling himself as if he were going into battle, he opens his bedroom door and makes his way toward the kitchen. He doesn’t look at Alec, though he can feel his imploring eyes following his across the room, and had seen out of the corner of his eye the way his slumped figure on the sofa had perked up as Magnus walked in.

“Magnus,” he says eventually, after they have been in the same room in silence for a few minutes.

Magnus pauses for a moment, hesitant without knowing why. He takes a sip of the glass of water he had poured for himself, not having the stomach for food after all. “Hey. You’re still here.”

It’s not meant to be rude or a dismissal.  Maybe a question, of where to go from here.

Alec has stood up to face Magnus, but he hasn’t moved, and they are several feet apart. His stance is rigid, almost soldier-like except for his left hand that’s twitching nervously. “Yeah, I – should I go?”

“Do what you want, Alec,” he says. It has never been this exhausting to talk to him before, and it makes Magnus ache even more, hoping dully that this isn’t another thing that has been taken from him.

Alec doesn’t make eye contact, his eyes darting around somewhere to his left, his brow furrowed. “I don’t want to leave you alone, but I – I don’t want to stay if you don’t want me to, so – please – talk to me, Magnus.”

He wants to, but the words keep dying in his throat. He magics the empty glass of water away and turns away from Alec, looking at the wide window overlooking Brooklyn. The city that he made a second home out of, this city that is still, even after all the years it has seen, younger than him. Velvety night cloaks New York, and the cloudy indigo air gusts quietly into the apartment through an open windowpane. Night is the kingdom of Brooklyn: once the sun falls below the horizon, the city is as of the sea. The streets like dark violet waves, fluid in the cover of darkness, the rushing air of passing traffic like blue wind.

Today he feels the centuries creaking in his bones, and the connection with this young city—its flickering neon, its shadowed alleys, its crumbling tenements and the magic and magnetic blood that runs in the veins below the city streets—seems lost for the moment. He has never felt older. He has never felt more like a child, lost in the sea of lights that stretch out before him. 

“I was thinking,” he says finally, after Alec seems to have given up trying to start a conversation, “of redecorating.”

He has tried to say the words casually, distant and grand as always, trying to build back the walls that have been destroyed, but they come out differently. Quietly, broken in the middle. Still, he continues, before Alec can say anything, before he can notice. He comes over and sits next to Alec, a few inches of spaces between them.

“I’m not exactly sure how, though.” In this moment, he wants to scorch everything that has been touched by that body that wasn’t his. He takes a moment to breathe, trying to control the raging wildfire that crackles just beneath his skin, threatening to engulf him, and then everything around him. His voice shakes from the effort—effort from something he thought he had mastered three centuries ago, that difficult and precise art of being a storm. “What do you think? You like blue, don’t you? It’s not – my favourite, but we can…”

“Magnus.” Something about the way Alec says his name, soft and sad, makes him finally look up and meet his eyes, that deep and gentle hazel gaze. “It’s – I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, Alec…”

 Poor Alec, who only ever wanted to protect him. The omamori that he gave him is still in Magnus’s pocket even at this moment, and he takes it out and looks at it for a moment. Alec sees it and turns away sharply, as if he had been burned. Magnus remembers as if it was yesterday the wide smile on Alec’s face as he gave it to Magnus, pleased and so willing to love. It wasn’t supposed to go like this, he thinks with an ache.

He looks at Alec’s hands, half-outstretched, half-helpless. There is still a scar on Alec’s hand, that he did not heal with his runes and did not let Magnus heal, the ugly raised redness of his skin that he uses to punish himself. It’s not the only one. Magnus knows the poetry of Alec’s body well, speaks the harsh language of his runes and scars as if he has been fluent in it his whole life—not some heroic epic that people might think from his stature and battle wounds, but something more quiet and special and somehow old and young at the same time, a lost scrap of divine lyric poetry from a forgotten century that even Magnus has not seen with his own eyes, a rhyme and meter never heard anywhere else. These half-angels, Magnus knows, they heal quickly, but marks don’t always fade. Every raised red or white scar, that are always stark like the black runes and dark hair against Alec’s naked porcelain skin in the light of the mornings they spend together, is one that Magnus loves deeply—but it sometimes they leave him wondering. Demons, they don’t always scratch from the outside.

He looks at Alec’s hands and knows that if anyone could ever understand, it would be Alec. Maybe not now or today, and not without help, but if anyone could someday, it would be him—this strange and cold boy, this soft-hearted soldier that Magnus has fallen for.    

Still, he looks at the scar on Alec’s hand. Hands that he has held and that have held him, hands that he has kissed, that he has loved. Loved for the deft way they hold blades and bows, for the uncertain way they move around when he doesn’t know what to say next. He sees those hands when he closes his eyes, feels them, feels that same raised scar around his neck, choking him, touching him with the intent to bruise. Feels them roughly pushing him into a chair, gagging his mouth shut as his lips form Alec’s name, touching him with the intent to kill.

He closes his eyes and can’t help the shudder that passes through him. He doesn’t want to be touched, but he wants to be touched, but not by Alec, but only by Alec. His body is his own now, his mind back where it belongs, but it does not feel like it used to. He doesn’t know when it ever will.

Alec sounds on the verge of tears. For what seems like the hundredth time, he says the only words that he seems to know. “I’m so sorry, Magnus.”

 _It’s okay_ , is what Magnus wants to say. But it feels wrong on his tongue, like it doesn’t belong. _It’s not your fault_ , he wants to say, but the words won’t come.

“I know,” is all he ends up saying. "But that doesn't always fix things."

They take something out of him, these words, this admission that reconciliation is more elusive than he thought. That forgiveness might, after all, need to be given. He feels exhausted.

After more silence, Alec wordlessly, at last, gets up to leave. “I’m just…gonna go,” he mumbles, dispirited, as he’s already taking a step away from Magnus.

Before he can get much farther, Magnus reaches out and grabs his wrist gently.

“Don’t,” he says. Alec looks at him, studying, imploring, trying to understand, but Magnus himself doesn’t know—he doesn’t know how to fix it, only that he doesn’t want Alec to leave yet. “Please.”

Alec sits back down next to Magnus. His grip on Alec’s wrist moves down to lock their fingers loosely together, his thumb rubbing a small circle on the scar on Alec’s palm. He closes his eyes, trying to forget. The agony, the screams, the memories. Alec’s hands.

With a monumental effort, he leans over and rests his head on Alec’s shoulder, eyes still closed. Alec doesn’t move, as he normally would, to put an arm around Magnus. Their hands still intertwined, their bodies touching ever so slightly, Magnus feels his heartrate begin to slow, and feels a short moment of restless peace for the first time today, before it all comes back to him again. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> yeah uh??? i wrote the bulk of this at like 2am and barely proofread it i dont even _know_ what this is but my tumblr is [here](http://daddarios.tumblr.com)


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